love

They sat one section over from us. A few rows further up so they were directly in my line of sight.

My eyes don’t typically wander during the music. It’s the time I use to center myself after the mayhem of getting the family to church by 9 am on Sunday morning.

But something drew my eyes away on this morning.

An older couple. Younger than my parents but older than Bray and I. No kids in the pew with them. So, if they had kids, I assumed they were grown. I’ve seen them for years but don’t know them. Simply attired. Nothing trendy or fancy on either husband or wife.

As a new song began to play, I saw him encircle his right arm around her completely. He reached across her back until he had her right arm which he gripped with what looked like love and compassion. Almost as if his arm was there to hold her up.

You don’t belittle our pain and our suffering

And You comfort us in our greatest unraveling

Jesus, my Jesus

She didn’t sing. She bit her lip and I couldn’t see the tears from my vantage point but I knew they were there. He rubbed her arm and held it tighter.

It went on that way. We sat for the offering and then one more song before the sermon.

If the stars were made to worship so will I

If the mountains bow in reverence so will I

If the oceans roar Your greatness so will I

He holding on to her. She standing there. Brave and silent. I don’t know what was happening in their lives, but it felt like she was biting her mouth to keep from utterly unraveling.

The words on the screen blurred before my own eyes as I watched the two of them.

I don’t often have a visual image of what love looks like. Of what faith looks like.

This was it.

He was love.

She was faith.

You wouldn’t notice him if you passed him on the street. He wasn’t tall or fit or oozing charisma. I don’t know how long they’ve been married. Looking at them, you’d think decades. He familiar with her. Knowing the song would be her undoing before it even was. The way he held on to her. Oh. I pray that’s what our marriage looks like as we get older and face bigger heartaches.

Looking at her, simple and unadorned, she looked like the bravest figure of faith on the planet in that moment. A Joan of Arc. I have no idea what she was going through. A child taken or crippling diagnosis or financial calamity. But she stood there. I’ve had seasons where the last thing I would do is come listen to someone talk about the love of God. When I certainly wasn’t feeling His love in a season. Sunday, she couldn’t sing the words. She didn’t try. But she stood there and let them fall over her. While her partner held her up.

The song, Extravagant, that first drew me to their quiet testimony, starts with:

You were a lover before time’s beginning

And you gave Your love freely withholding nothing…

And then it ends:

It’s extravagant, it doesn’t make sense

We’ll never comprehend, the way You love us.

It’s true. But I thought how she must understand better the way her Savior loves her because of how her lover held on to her one Sunday morning.

I could hear someone talking before I could see him. Last thing I remembered, I’d been in a cold room on an operating table with bright lights overhead and busy workers in scrubs strapping down my arms and legs as an oxygen mask lowered.

Next thing I know, a deep voice coaxed me out of my sleep. Nurse on the right of the hospital bed, Bray on the right. The nurse was explaining things to Bray as he held my hand. I closed my eyes again. So tired.

My pesky diseased gallbladder was gone, Bray reported later that day. He helped me get dressed and into the wheelchair. He drove me home and showed me some big black stones the surgeon extracted to show the kids.

I hurt and was tired. Bray ran around getting me comfortable. More pillows. Medicine. Water. Chicken broth, eventually. By evening the air in my belly sent shooting pain through my shoulder leaving me in tears over the pain. I couldn’t lay down because of the pain from all the air which required walking to moderate, but the walking set my scars to searing.

He tried everything. He held my hand. Rubbed my back. Googled solutions for the pain. My belly was swollen and bruised, my hair flat against my head, and my teeth unbrushed since morning. We settled on a heating pad as a temporary solution so I could lay down.

There was nothing beautiful or romantic or glamorous about the moment. But it was the perfect demonstration of love on Valentine’s week. A clear picture of love without shades.

All week I’d thought about another one of these Shades movies coming out for Valentine’s week. It broke my heart to think people have started believing love comes in those shades. I’ve not read the books or seen the movies, but I know enough to know true love doesn’t look like twisted connections in high end sheets.

I’ve known this man for over 13 years. We’ve been married nearly 11. He doesn’t buy me jewelry. I’ve never been surprised with a trip or spontaneous adventure. He doesn’t send flowers.

It used to bother me. In the early days when Hallmark defined my notions of love.

Now I know what love really looks like. This is the fourth time my husband has sat with me in a surgical gown. He’s had to take a call from a waiting room to authorize doctors to cut me open and remove a tumor from my uterus. He’s held my hands, loving me at 95 pounds heavier than usual, as doctors pulled three little babes out of my womb. Just two years ago, he wheeled me out of a surgical center with my knee outstretched after repairs to the bone. And here again, he was the constant, ready to help me heal.

I know I can count on him. I know he wants to do everything in his power to keep me from hurting, not to deliver pain. Now, we can hurt each other. Don’t get me wrong. We’re human and we hurt each other by not doing the right thing or saying the wrong thing.

But I know true love isn’t roses and perfect bodies and surprise trips to Paris. It cleans up vomit in the middle of the night. It rubs your shoulders when the pain is closing in. It holds your hands and feeds the kids and washes clothes. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (I Cor 13:7)

Your love may not look like the facsimile projected on the screen or written on the pages, but don’t long for that. The real love, the kind which lasts, is found in the quiet small moments of your everyday life. It showed up this past week like a symphony, sunlight not shade, and reminded me how powerful the real thing is.

It seemed more appropriate to write about faith on a sober reflection day. But I’d been short of words and had little fresh to offer.

Then I had this wonderful Thursday night out with my husband and decided I would wait to write until today and write about love.

Last week, a couple invited Bray and I to one of our favorite little spots in all of Houston. It’s basically a bar where singers/songwriters come to croon on a tiny stage in a small room filled with tables crushed in together.

It’s the place Bray and I met over 12 years ago. This singer/songwriter, a new one to me, sang with all her heart in her black leather pants and her side of lemon water. I glanced over to the corner where, in early December 2003, I met Bray wearing my own black leather pants. I can still see us exactly – him walking over from the bar in his blue jeans and button down shirt and a much younger me wearing a long gray sweater and high heeled boots with those pants.

This talented musician crooned about broken hearts and blood moons and Hallelujahs and her grandmother. She even had us turn and sing to each other how I want to be with you.

You see, it was an ordinary Thursday night. Bray had been out of town and I’d been running from a work appointment to the dentist to the house to relieve our nanny. He’d had to coach kindergarten softball, which apparently did not go well, and we were both frayed and torn as we dodged rush hour traffic to make the early concert on a back street in the center of the city.

But as she sang about being the lucky ones, we knew it and believed it and leaned into, and onto, each other. We ate our fish and chips and drank our beer and watched a precious married couple near the front kiss during each song as they celebrated the wife’s birthday with tenderness and obvious adoration.

There’s this idealized romanticized notion of love and marriage with the roses and the silky lingerie that still fits after 10 years and sunset walks on the beach. But you see, I don’t like roses and my honeymoon lingerie doesn’t fit my post-triplet body and we don’t live near a beach.

I wouldn’t trade all that in for my real life lessons on love and marriage. Where we go on dates and I have peanut butter on my hair and he pretends not to notice and we still hold hands and we kiss hello and goodbye and he wakes up at 5 am to hide Easter eggs so we can enjoy one more year of the kids believing and hunting eggs in pajamas at daybreak. We mess it up and hurt each other’s feelings and struggle to compromise, but we can still sit in a little hole in the wall on a back street in the center of the city and be oh-so-grateful to have found each other in the exact same spot on that late night all those years ago.

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